CES Mobile Wrap: DSP, GPU, CPU Redefined

LAS VEGAS — There is no such thing as “game over” for the mobile apps processor battle.

Evident at the International CES this year was that the ever-increasing flood of features into mobile devices is keeping silicon designers on their toes.

The new differentiators cropping up for mobile devices are the always-on mobile SoC that can be promptly awakened by voice activation, sensor fusion, multi-channel surround-sound audio, eye-tracking, post video processing, and more. An additional wrinkle is that many mobile SoCs are also being pitched as the brain that drives an automaker's in-vehicle infotainment system.

Huawei unveiled Ascend Mate 2 4G at CES.

Such changes are prompting apps processor designers to rethink DSP, GPU, and CPU cores, giving birth to a new generation of "light" apps processors, designed as co-processors to be used in conjunction with a main apps processor. Many designers are also intent on beefing up the performance of their own apps processors, by re-crafting graphics cores (e.g., Nvidia's Tegra K1) and/or adding more processor cores (e.g., MediaTek's octa-core apps processor).

"Forbidden wife" exposed
Describing DSP, often deeply embedded in an apps processor, as a "forbidden wife," Gideon Wertheizer, CEO of Ceva, a DSP IP core supplier, said in an interview with EE Times that DSP cores are back in demand.

That trend was triggered by Qualcomm last summer, he noted, when the cellular chip giant announced the availability of its Hexagon DSP core -- used inside the Snapdragon chip -- for third-party programmers. The move caught competing apps processor companies off guard, said Wertheizer.

In the past, Qualcomm rarely highlighted its Hexagon DSP cores, despite the fact that Snapdragon uses two DSP cores for baseband processing, and another DSP core for application processing. Now that Qualcomm is courting independent programmers to write software to the latter, Qualcomm's competitors are taking a fresh interest in the forbidden wife, said Wertheizer.

Leading mobile OEMs are already making a few tweaks. Look no further than Samsung's Galaxy S4.

An exciting read. I can't help but think of Texas Instruments' (discontinued) OMAP applications processors upon reading this. The latest OMAP4's, for instance, had an interesting mixture of processing elements on the SoC (2xCortex-A9, 2xCortex-M3, 1xC6x DSP, imaging/video accelerator hardware..) but making efficient use of all these (or just being able to program a relevant subset) was far from trivial. TI had efforts to improve programmability of these "exotic" cores, such as the C6EZRun which offered a remote procedure calls-like interface between the ARM core and the DSP.

The proliferation of exotic cores aside, I'm interested in seeing how much they end up getting utilized and what companies do to make development easier/more widespread.

Yes,The market of the apps processor are quite high in demand due to the growing demand of smartphone and the apps processor development companies are doing continue research for upgrading their processor value in market.

Talking to several executives at CES, I realized that the pendulum is once again swinging back to apps processors in the mobile world.

In 2012 and 2013, it was all about who gets to roll out LTE modems quickly -- certified and approved by operators -- to catch with Qualcomm. But apparently, that's not enough to break into the mobile market now. Everyone appears scrambling to beef up their apps processors in order to meet with the growing feature sets of smartphones.

More than any other company, Mediatek has really used CES 2014 to establish itself and its global ambitions. The company has clearly shown that there has been a paradigm shift in the way its Chinese OEM partners think and that, meanwhile, it is looking to attract business outside of the region and it's starting to do just that.